What defines a Fairy Tale versus typical Fantasy?
My second-grader has been asked to write a "fairy tale." We are both clueless about what makes a story a "fairy tale" different from a fantasy story. Is there some special, defining element to a fairy tale that we're missing?
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Mathematico-logical: fairy tales are a subset of fantasy tales/stories.
For second graders, one would want a short story with a happy ending.
A story with a moral to it is a fable (a la Aesop or LaFontaine), a different sub-set.
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I believe that the traditional sense of the term fairy tale is used for a fairly concise story that is written to appeal mainly to children. The general context of a fairy tale would be the standard "Once upon a time.... and they lived happily ever after, THE END"
Generally these stories involved magic, fantasy characters and creatures, and were meant to teach a lesson, but not always.
Merriam Webster's dictionary defines fairy tale like this 1 a : a story (as for children) involving fantastic forces and beings (as fairies, wizards, and goblins) —called also fairy story b : a story in which improbable events lead to a happy ending http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fairy%20tale
Fantasy can include all of these, but is generally perceived to be a longer work of fiction and may or may not be geared toward a younger audience. You can have works of Fantasy that follow parallels of a fairy tale type story, but do not fit the traditional definition of a "fairy tale". Hope that helps.
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These are probably evolving terms rather than hard and fast divisions, but what I would say distinguishes fairy tales from fantasy is that a fairy tale is a tale about a human being encountering fairy folk, who represent a danger to ordinary human life. Fairies have been Disnified in recent years, but Yeats poem "The Stolen Child" (http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/816/) is much closer to the original idea.
Fantasy, on the other hand, has become more and more about the wielding of magic or otherwise fantastical powers. Thus we have Harry Potter: not a story about ordinary people encountering dangerous magic, but about an extraordinary boy practicing magic and using it for good. In this sense fantasy is very close to science fiction, which is again about the exploitation of knowledge for power.
In this sense we may see the fairy story and fantasy as diametrically opposed takes on the same theme. And in this sense, horror today is perhaps closer to fairy stories than fantasy is.
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